Making and unmaking bodies: embodying knowledge and place in environmental history

We open this special issue 'Bodies of Knowledge' by invoking the recent history and deep past of the reefa vast earthly body under siege. What Attenborough's exploration of the reef highlighted was the gulf between knowing about the reef's challenges and acting upon that knowledge. He wondered, 'do we really care so little about the earth upon which we live that we don't wish to protect one of its greatest wonders from the consequences of our behaviours?'1 In bridging this gap, the historian Iain McCalman suggests that environmental history has a valuable affective role to play by making the past meaningful to the present and the future. A meaningful or 'passionate history', as McCalman shows in his own biography of the reef, is one that populates or embodies the past.2 We take to the reef ourselves to illuminate the historiographical and conceptual issues that animate the contributions to this special issue. What we know about environments, and how we know them, affects the ways we relate to and engage with them, and how we embody them, physically and culturally, over time.